Frequently asked questions
If you've got a question about
Free Sitemap Generator, chances are
you can find the answer on this page.
If not, use
this form to contact us.
You can also
search this site.
Questions
1.
Why should I create sitemap in the first place?
2.
I created an account but never got the activation message! What to do?
3.
Why should I create a fsgXXXXXXX.txt on my site?
4.
How are priority and change frequency calculated?
5.
I want to use the auto-upload package, is it safe?
6.
I don't have PHP and still want to use the auto-upload package..
7.
What does "Server Load" mean?
8.
I have started a job, but want to cancel it. What should I do?
9.
What is your uptime guarantee?
10.
The auto-upload tool keeps complaining about file permissions, what are those?
11.
Does your spider honor robots.txt files?
12.
Do I need a Google Sitemaps API key to use this site?
13.
Why do I have to manually start checking the number of indexed pages?
14.
I've entered my site, hit the Make sitemap button, but all it does
is put my homepage in the sitemap. What's wrong?
15.
What does Auto Ping Google/Auto Ping Bing mean?
16.
How do I delete my account?
17.
I use the Indexed Pages feature and now I have 0 pages indexed!
18.
Why am I on queue position 204 when I am a premium member?
19.
How does your spider identify itself? What User-agent should I use in my robots.txt?
20.
Nice tool you have, but it takes soooooooo long to create a sitemap!
21.
What is this Priority label about?
22.
I like your site and want to advertise my related product
23.
Where is the forum?
24.
Should I use this service just once?
25.
Can freesitemapgenerator.com generate sitemaps for secure sites?
26.
Why is this a free service?
27.
I put the fsgXXX.txt file in place, but verification fails
28.
Will Google automatically look for it?
Answers
- 1. Why should I create sitemap in the first place?
- Because it won't hurt you, and it will give you some nice benefits
- 2. I created an account but never got the activation message! What to do?
- You can start by letting us send the activation message again. If that still
doesn't work try using another e-mail address on a different domain. Some
providers (aol.com) do not accept our automated messages.
- 3. Why should I create a fsgXXXXXXX.txt on my site?
- Because generating a sitemap with our tools will generate traffic to
your site (we spider your entire site), we want to make sure you own this site. We don't want ghost
accounts that consume bandwidth without a valid reason.
- 4. How are priority and change frequency calculated?
- We do not know the real priority or change frequency for a given page
but we try to calculate it based on the links used on your site.
You can turn these two options on or off by clicking on the Edit
button in the Control Panel.
- 5. I want to use the auto-upload package, is it safe?
- No, it is not. It is designed to write files to your server! And it uses
PHP to do so. And the code is published on this site.... So there are a lot
of things that could go wrong.
But we have tried to be as cautious as possible: there are two keys to
identify a valid connection. That should scare hackers off. And besides
that, the code only writes to files that are named sitemap*. But just to
make sure: use at own risk!
But to give you some assurance: we use the upload package ourselves!
- 6. I don't have PHP and still want to use the auto-upload package..
- You could try to rewrite the PHP to ASP or whatever language you like,
but at this time only PHP is supported.
- 7. What does "Server Load" mean?
- The Server load bar indicates how busy our servers are: more blue ==>
busy. More blue means it will take longer for your sitemap to be generated.
- 8. I have started a job, but want to cancel it. What should I do?
- Well, once a job is started it can't be stopped. But don't worry it will
stop when it has reached 5,000 pages.
- 9. What is your uptime guarantee?
- We like to say always but remember this
is a free service. We have no uptime guarantee but our track record is pretty good.
Check out our publicly available uptime statistics at freesitemapgenerator.com uptime page.
- 10. The auto-upload tool keeps complaining about file permissions, what are those?
- Google it - it's all in the manual pages.
- 11. Does your spider honor robots.txt files?
- Yes it does. You can
read more at the official robots.txt site.
- 12. Do I need a Google Sitemaps API key to use this site?
- No you don't.
- 13. Why do I have to manually start checking the number of indexed pages?
- Because we have 1000s of sites in our database and we don't want to keep sending queries to Google for users that aren't using this site anymore.
- 14. I've entered my site, hit the Make sitemap button, but all it does
is put my homepage in the sitemap. What's wrong?
- Most likely
our spider could find any links on your homepage. If they
are all created with JavaScript, or some other way, spiders have a hard time
finding links. You could try to add a piece of navigation to
your site where you put direct links to the most important sections of your
site. Put this on your homepage, it will help spiders (not only ours) navigate your site
better and faster.
Another common cause of this is your robots.txt
file. Make sure it allows spiders to your site if you want it spidered. By
clicking on the Errors button in the control panel you can see if
any pages where blocked by robots.txt.
Another thing we have seen a couple of times: you enter the
homepage url: http://freesitemapgenerator.com/ but when loaded it
redirects to http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com. Those are
two different sites, or at least it could be.
You can run a quick scan for your homepage by clicking the
Test button. You can also do a quick scan here.
- 15. What does Auto Ping Google/Auto Ping Bing mean?
- Once you have a new sitemap, or
updated an existing one you can let Google™ and Bing™ know by sending a small
request to them. We can do this automatically for you when we have auto
uploaded a new sitemap to your website. If you manually upload a sitemap or
use our Upload button you should notify Google™ you self. More
information can be found at our links page.
- 16. How do I delete my account?
- Send an e-mail with your login,
password and the url of one your sites to us and we will
delete all data in our databases. Use the contact form to send an
e-mail.
- 17. I use the Indexed Pages feature and now I have 0 pages indexed!
-
Don't panic! this happens... Sometimes the API returns 0 as a result, sometimes it just doesn't
give back any results (empty file). A lot of reasons for '0 indexed pages'.
Just hit the Check Now! button again in a few hours, see what happens...
- 18. Why am I on queue position 204 when I am a premium member?
-
It can take a few minutes after upgrading your account
before all our processes see the change. Be patient, check
again 15 minutes later. If your account still hasn't been
upgraded let us know so we can investigate
- 19. How does your spider identify itself? What User-agent should I use in my robots.txt?
-
Your can use User-agent: freesitemapgenerator, but
because we try to generate Google™ sitemaps, we also look for the
User-agent: Googlebot lines in your robots.txt. So
you most likely don't have to add a special freesitemapgenerator section in
your robots.txt.
- 20. Nice tool you have, but it takes soooooooo long to create a sitemap!
-
Not actually a question, but we get this e-mail a lot.
Basically, what we do is we spider you entire site to see what pages are
available. If you have a big site: it can take while to accomplish this. If
you have a small site it will be done very soon. Just sit and wait. We will
send you an automated e-mail as soon as your sitemap is ready.
To check how busy our servers are at any time, just go to
the homepage and check the bar labeled server load. Completely white:
nothing to do (hasn't happened since our launch) or completely blue: heavy
usage, new jobs will be put in the queue to be executed when resources are
free.
- 21. What is this Priority label about?
- We have 3 priorities set
up: Normal, High and Premium High. The higher the
priority, the more resources are given to your job (i.e.
they will finish faster). All sites will get Priority Normal,
if you install the Live
Data package and have sent back enough data your site
will get priority 'High' and that will get your site 3 time
more resources scheduled than 'Normal' jobs. Premium High
is for Premium Members. Premium members' sites are given
more resources and will not have to wait in the queue.
- 22. I like your site and want to advertise my related product
- Contact us for advertising opportunities at www.freesitemapgenerator.com.
- 23. Where is the forum?
The forum is closed, removed, deleted, gone. We
got too much spam on it. Sad, but we had to do something. Maybe in
the future a forum or something like that will return but for now:
forum closed due to spam.
The Forum is back! Join the conversation at Sitemap Forum..
Again, too much spam... the forum is closed again...- 24. Should I use this service just once?
- A sitemap is a static file on your server.
Once you have added or removed pages you should create a fresh sitemap.
Use the auto
upload feature to make things easier for you or upgrade to a premium account to let us
automagically
generate a new sitemap every 3 weeks.
- 25. Can freesitemapgenerator.com generate sitemaps for secure sites?
- Yes, we can generate sitemap for an https websites too.
- 26. Why is this a free service?
- We got this question a couple of times
this week -- time for a why-is-this-a-free-service page.
- 27. I put the fsgXXX.txt file in place, but verification fails
- There
are some common problems with the verification:
- check the url listed in your control panel. If it is
http://DOMAIN.COM/, the url we will be checking is
http://DOMAIN.COM/fsgXXX.txt. If your website is configured
to redirect all requests to DOMAIN.COM to www.DOMAIN.COM,
verification will fail.
- check the url listed in your control panel. If it is
http://www.domain.com/index.html or something like that, the
url we will be checking is
http://www.domain.com/index.html/fsg.XXX.txt which ofcourse
is wrong. Do not add 'index.html' or 'default.asp' the the
homepage url. Just the domain, subdomain or directory is
enough.
If you still can't get it to work, please contact us for help.
- 28. Will Google automatically look for it?
- Probably not. You can submit
your sitemap using the Google Webmaster tools
and you can put a reference to your sitemap in your robots.txt which
will help all spiders find your sitemap. If you do not have a
robots.txt file, create one in the root of your webserver and add
this like:
sitemap: http://subdomain.domain.com/sitemap.xml
See an example robots.txt with sitemap
reference
homepage |
control panel |
search
